UN climate panel charts next steps

February 27, 2015This article courtesy of Nature News.

IPCC prepares for new leadership and plans another assessment of climate science.

Despite calls for change, the next United Nations climate assessment will take much
the same form as the last one, the panel charged with producing the recurring reports
announced on 27 February. The decision comes just days after the panel’s long-time
leader resigned in the middle of a sexual-harassment investigation.

Meeting in Nairobi from 24 to 27 February, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) made several minor adjustments to its assessment process.
The changes aim to engage more scientists, in part by boosting the representation
of developing nations in the group’s governing body. But the basic framework will
continue to comprise a comprehensive assessment published every five to seven years
plus two or three special reports on specific topics. The fifth and most recent IPCC
climate assessment, which was completed last year, concluded that it is “extremely
likely” that humans are responsible for the bulk of recent global warming.

“The overall structure remains, but some key aspects of its mode of operation have
been improved to facilitate a fuller participation of all scientists, in particular
from developing countries,” says IPCC vice-chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist
at the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. “This was a key
thing I think the IPCC needed to do.”

The meeting follows the sudden departure of Rajendra Pachauri, who has headed the IPCC since 2002 and whose term was due to end in October. Pachauri
is under investigation over allegations that he sexually harassed a colleague at the
Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, of which he is director. He has denied
the claims but elected to step down on 24 February, soon after announcing that he
would not be attending the Nairobi meeting.

“We cannot ignore the resignation of Dr. Pachauri, but the allegations against him … do
not relate to the IPCC,” said IPCC secretary Renate Christ during a press conference
on 27 February. Christ said that the panel will, however, ensure that it maintains
an atmosphere in which “everyone’s rights are respected and upheld”.

Ahead of the meeting, some scientists involved in the IPCC argued that the assessment
process is too slow and requires too much time from the more than 2,000 scientists
from around the world who volunteer for duty. Some have advocated that the IPCC put
less energy into monumental assessments and more into shorter reports that focus on
major scientific and policy debates. During the last major assessment, the IPCC released
special reports on renewable energy and the risks of extreme weather, but even those were major undertakings.

Christopher Field, co-chair of the working group on impacts and adaptation for the
most recent assessment, says that there are ways to streamline the process, but maintains
that the value of the IPCC comes from the give and take between scientists and governments.
“Operationally, it is hard to imagine a way to capture this unique value without key
process steps, including multiple rounds of monitored review and line-by-line approval
of summaries for policy-makers,” he says.

Open up

At the meeting, IPCC members said that the next assessment should have a greater focus
on specific regions and include a broader review of non-English scientific literature,
with more involvement of science writers and communications experts to help reach
a broader range of people.

The panel also wanted to open itself up to researchers who have been seeking access
to the closed-door meetings in an effort to study the assessment process and the institution
itself; research proposals will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

“That is indeed a major step forward toward both increased transparency of the IPCC
process and eventually finding ways to improve it,” says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate
scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey who is part of a team of researchers
seeking such access.

Oppenheimer has advocated reforms that would emphasize smaller, faster assessments
while decreasing the workload for scientists. He says that the latest decision largely
represents “business as usual”, but does open the door for improvements. In particular,
he credited the IPCC for emphasizing communications and engagement with developing
countries. “This is important and needs to be done,” he says.

The IPCC will hold its leadership election in October. Candidates include van Ypersele
and Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at the University of Bern who co-led the working
group that wrote the physical-science portion of the report during the most recent
assessment. Field, who is founding director of the department of global ecology at
the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, says that he, too, is likely to
run.